Many successful people count the first year after college as a defining moment in their young careers.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk founded his first company during that time; Stephen King published a short story that would later become a movie; and Sheryl Sandberg learned she wanted to pursue a career in business instead of law.
But while these people enjoyed success from the moment they left campus, others initially experienced frustration.
For instance, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's first post-grad job ended in failure when he was cut from a Canadian Football League team, and Albert Einstein spent his first two years without any job at all.
As an example of the many directions the road to success can take, we chose to highlight what Oprah Winfrey, Carlos Slim, and 15 other fascinating and successful people did the first year after they left college.
Albert Einstein was unemployed.
Einstein spent his first two years out of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School without a full-time job, in large part because the professors whose classes he cut refused to recommend him for teaching posts.
Though Einstein's degree was for teaching physics and math, his first job came when his friend Marcel Grossmann hooked him up with a clerking job at the Swiss patent office in 1902.
Einstein's father died shortly afterward, thinking that his son was a failure.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was cut by a Canadian Football League team.
Before he was "the most electrifying man in sports entertainment," Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was a backup defensive lineman on the University of Miami football team.
He tried to go pro after he graduated in 1995, but he was cut from the CFL's Calgary Stampeders two months into the season. "That was my absolute worst time,"he later told The Hollywood Reporter.
Johnson responded by persuading his father to train him in the family business of professional wrestling soon after, and he made his World Wrestling Federation debut as Rocky Maivia the following year.
Hillary Clinton worked in an Alaska salmon processing factory.
Shortly after giving a controversial commencement speech at Wellesley University, the future Secretary of State struck out for Alaska, where she spent a summer washing dishes at Mt. McKinley National Park and working in a salmon processing factory.
Clinton wrote in her book "Living History" that the salmon processing job required her to "wear knee-high boots and stand in bloody water while removing guts from the salmon with a spoon."
She was ultimately fired for telling one of her supervisors that some of the fish looked bad, but she later joked that the work was great training for her time in Washington.
The following fall she enrolled at Yale Law School, where she met her future husband, Bill.
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